"Bus passengers murdered in Iraq " Wow....that 'surge' is really working well, isn't it?

[in_cog_ni_to]

:eyes: 71 troops have died so far this MONTH! It's only May 21st! :grr:


21/05/2007 - 4:05:51 PM

Bus passengers murdered in Iraq

A group of gunmen in two cars attacked a minibus in Iraq today, killing seven passengers, including a child, police said.

The minibus was heading to Baghdad from a Shiite town north of the capital.

It left the town of Khalis and was near the violence-wracked city of Baqouba, 35 miles north-east of Baghdad, when it was ambushed outside the town of Hibhib, police said.

The attack highlights the sectarian violence and instability that continues to plague Diyala province north of Baghdad despite the 3-month-old security crackdown in Baghdad and the surrounding areas.

In western Baghdad, a roadside bomb detonated near a group of Iraqi soldiers patrolling the Sunni-dominated Adil neighbourhood in western Baghdad today, killing three of the soldiers and injuring two others.

In the confusion of the attack, the soldiers fired near the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, the leader of parliament’s largest Sunni Arab bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, according to his office. No one was injured in the shootings.

The stepped-up US and Iraqi patrols of the capital during the crackdown have left the troops more vulnerable to attack by insurgents, military officials say.

The US military reported yesterday that six US soldiers on patrol in Baghdad were killed in a roadside bombing along with their interpreter on Saturday. A seventh soldier died in a blast on Saturday in Diwaniya, a mostly Shiite city 80 miles south of the capital, where radical Shiite militias operate.



Those deaths brought the number of American troops killed in Iraq since Friday to at least 15 – eight of them in Baghdad. So far, at least 71 US troops have died in Iraq this month – most of them from bombs.<snip>

http://www.irishexaminer.com/breaking/story.asp?j=4673985&p=4674xxx&n=4674077&x=